Once a Russian boxing champion, Renat Agzamov is now known as a celebrity cake maker specializing in elaborate, edible masterpieces that sell for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A self-described workaholic, Renat Agzamov baked his first cake when he was only seven-years old and claims to have since created over 2,700 cakes, constantly trying to improve his skills and surpass clients’ expectations. Despite dedicating much of his youth to sports and becoming a boxing champion in his native Russia, the talented food artist says that cooking in general and cake making in particular have always been his greatest passions. Today, he is one of the world’s most sought-after cake artisans, creating incredibly complex wedding cakes for high-profile clients all around the world.

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The CIA headquarters in Langley is home to lost of mysteries, but one in particular has captured the attention of professional code breakers and puzzle enthusiasts for the last three decades.

Kryptos, a coded sculpture created by American artist Jim Sanborn has remained unsolved ever since it was originally installed at the CIA headquarters in November of 1990. The agency’s code breakers as well as other professional puzzle solvers around the world have been struggling to unravel the secrets of the 1,800 characters carved into the 12-foot block of copper, and although they’ve succeeded in cracking three of the coded messages created by Sanborn, the fourth and final one remains unsolved. Experts have tried every technique in the book, transposition, binary, polyalphabetic substitution, even Morse code, but so far no one has been able to decipher the 97-character-long fourth part of the Kryptos Sculpture.

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Finnish startup Solar Foods has come up with a way to produce a protein-rich food called Solein from electricity, water and air, by using an environment-friendly process similar to brewing beer.

Described as the world’s most environmentally friendly protein, Solein is is made by applying electricity to water to release bubbles of carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Living microbes are then added to the liquid to feed on the carbon dioxide and hydrogen bubbles and produce the Solein, which is then dried to make the powder. It’a natural fermentation process similar to beer brewing, but it requires a special reactor that reportedly resembles a hurricane lantern. The dried Solein has a protein content of 50 percent and looks and tastes just like wheat flour. It can be used in all kinds of diets and can be 3D-printed for added texture.

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Most people struggle to solve a 3×3 Rubik’s cube with their hands, but there are people out there who can do it in under 20 seconds, using only their feet.

You’ve probably heard of people solving Rubik’s cubes blindfolded, using only one hand and even while juggling them; all these different ways of solving the popular puzzle are impressive to watch, but there’s another way of doing it that will probably blow your mind – solving the colorful cube using nothing but your feet. For some reason, I never imagined solving a Rubik’s cube without touching it with your hands was even possible, but it turns out people can do it much faster than the vast majority can using our hands. The current record for the fastest Rubik’s cube solved exclusively with the lower extremity of the legs beneath the ankles is 16.9 seconds.

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The “Delusion Splash T-shirt” is an intriguing Japanese garment that cleverly uses shading to trick people into thinking that you look much better than you actually do.

Japanese clothing designers seem to be on a quest to help consumers achieve the toned physique they’ve always dreamed of without actually stepping foot in a gym or turning to plastic surgery. After the Super Macho T, an inflatable undershirt that artificially enhanced skinny men’s muscles, and the Illusion Grid t-shirt, a women’s shirt that used distortion and shading to create the illusion of an ample bosom, we now have yet another white t-shirt designed to create the illusion of an enhanced physique. Created by the brilliant minds at ekoD Works, the new Faint Muscle Mousou Mapping T-shirt is designed to look sheer, revealing the wearer’s impressive assets.

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Zack Pinsent, a 25-year-old tailor from Brighton, in the UK, burned his last pair of jeans over a decade ago, and has been wearing elegant Regency-period costumes ever since.

Zack claims he never enjoyed wearing the modern clothes that most of us put on every day. Instead, he was always fascinated by the elegant fashion of Britain’s Regency Era and other historical styles going back to the 1600s. He taught himself how to make the clothes he dreamed of wearing and once he became good enough at it, he decided to cut modern clothes from his life forever. The talented tailor remembers ceremoniously burning his last pair of jeans at age 14 as a turning point that changed his life. Dressing as a Regency Era gentleman every day gave him a huge confidence boost, and he wouldn’t dream of going back to regular clothing.

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A baby in Indonesia has been awarded the title of “world’s strangest name” after it was revealed that his parents legally registered him as “Google”; no surname or middle name, just Google, just like the search engine.

The eight-month-old boy’s father, 31-year-old Andi Cahya Saputra, told Indonesian media that he first contemplated the idea of giving his child a tech-related name when his wife was seven months pregnant. Before that, he had considered more common names, like Albar Dirgantara Putra, or names mentioned in the Quran, but in the end he decided that none of them were quite right. So he ended up looking at names of technology companies and products like “Windows, iPhone, Microsoft and iOS”, and ultimately settled on Google. Although the mother didn’t really like the idea at first, she ultimately agreed and now they have a boy named after the world’s most popular internet search engine.

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Butterfly pupae are easy targets for predators in search of an easy protein-rich meal, and one would think that the flashier the cocoon, the higher the chances of being spotted and eaten , but the Mechanitis polymnia, aka the orange-spotted tiger clearwing and its shiny, gold-like pods are proof that the opposite is true.

The orange-spotted tiger clearwing butterfly lives in the jungles of Central and South America, from Mexico all the way to the Amazon rain-forests. It’s a colorful little thing, with a wingspan of 65 to 75 millimeters, but it’s not exactly the most eye-catching of butterflies. Its pupae however are pure gold, literally. Well, not really literally, but they look just like elaborate gold jewelry hanging on the back of plant leaves, and even on the walls of houses in rural areas. But unlike actual gold jewels, these shiny, metallic-looking chrysalises are not meant to draw attention, but distract predators and even discourage them from getting to close. It’s a natural defense mechanism, and a very effective one at that.

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In what has been described as one of the most daring rackets in history, one or more individuals used a silicone mask to impersonate France’s minister of defense, Jean-Yves Le Drian, and scam an estimated €80 million ($90 million) from wealthy victims.

Jean-Yves Le Drian served as France’s defense minister from 2012 to 2017, and is currently the country’s Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs. He is an important political figure in his homeland, but also a relatively obscure one, which is why investigators believe he was chosen as the target of one of the boldest identity thefts in recorded history. One or more scammers used a custom silicone mask and a cleverly decorated office to fool various members of government and wealthy businessman into thinking that they were being contacted by Mr. Le Drian who requested financial help to pay the ransoms of journalists captured by Islamists in the Middle East. Some of the victims saw through the ruse, but many complied and donated millions.

The scam was simple yet pretty well thought out. Scammers would pose as a member of Le Drian’s inner circle and contact both french and foreign businessmen to arrange a conversation with the esteemed “minister”. In the beginning, the conversations were carried out over a phone, with the scammer impersonating the French minister reproducing Le Drian’s voice almost to perfection.  But, then, in order to make the  whole thing even more believable, they switched to video calls via Skype.

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An Argentinian local court ordered a 70-year-old man to pay his ex-wife 8 million pesos ($173,000) as compensation for 27 years of house work.

Judge Victoria Famá made the landmark ruling after taking into consideration that the elderly couple’s roles had been well-determined during their 30-year marriage, with the woman, identified only as M.L., taking care of the household, while the husband went to work. Despite holding a degree in economics, the woman put aside her professional career to raise her children and take care of the house. By the time M.L.’s husband left her, she was already 60-years-old, too old to even be considered on the job market.

“After 27 years of marriage the accused abandoned his wife when she turned 60 years old, the age at which women obtain retirement benefits, being excluded from the labour market,” Judge Famá’s ruling stated. “The economic dependence of wives on their husbands is one of the central mechanisms through which women are subordinated in society.”

The Argentinian couple separated in 2009, and divorced two years later. Since then, the woman has experienced financial difficulties due to her inability to find a job and receiving meager retirement benefits, while her husband reportedly “lived a good life”.

“This verdict is very novel because it acknowledges that what we do in our homes is a job, care tasks are a job because they involve time, effort and skills,” Lucia Martelotte, deputy executive director of the Latin American Justice and Gender Team, said. “But this goes unseen and women do not get a salary for that.”

Judge Famá described the compensation amount as “a reasonable sum in order to balance the disparate economic situations of the spouses”. She added that the woman’s degree in economics and the age at which her husband decided to leave her were also taken into consideration.

Lawyers in Argentina have called the verdict “very novel and the amount awarded to the plaintiff “unprecedented”.

OECD data shows that women do more unpaid work at home than men in all 10 of the most developed countries in the world…

Outside the Japanese town of Otsuchi, on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, there is a white, glass-paneled phone booth with a black rotary phone connected to nothing and nowhere. Ever since the tragic tsunami of 2010, which claimed nearly 20,000 human lives, thousands of grieving people have visited the booth to “call” their lost loved ones as a way of coping with their loss.

The Wind Phone, as the now famous Otsuchi telephone booth is commonly known, was actually built a year before the 2011 tsunami that ravaged Japan’s Tōhoku coast. Otsuchi resident, Itaru Sasaki, had lost his cousin in 2010 and decided to build a phone booth in his hilltop garden from where he would call his dear relative as a way of dealing with grief. He would dial his cousin’s phone number on an old, unconnected rotary phone, and his words would be “carried on the wind” as he spoke. Even though no one would talk back to him, it made Sasaki feel a deeper connection to his cousin.

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An Indian businessman who allegedly staged a stupid plane hijacking hoax to get his wife fired by the airline so they could spend more time together was recently sentenced to life in prison.

Birju Salla, the 38-year-old scion of a wealthy family of jewellers based in Mumbai, became the first person to be sentenced under India’s strict Anti-Hijacking Act of 2016. The funny thing is that he never actually intended to hijack a plane, all he wanted was to get his beloved  fire so they could spend more time together. He told the court that by printing a hijacking threat and planting it in the toilet of a Jet Airways plane, the airline would close its Delhi operation and fire his younger wife, so she would be forced to return to Mumbai where they could be together more. Things didn’t work out quite as planned…

Birju Salla’s troubles began when, during his frequent flights from Mumbai to Delhi, he fell in love with a Jet Airways customer care executive. They began having an affair in 2017, but the businessman quickly became frustrated with how little time they spent together. He felt that her job was always getting in the way of their love, so in July of 2017 he secretly married her – although he was already married and had two children – and asked her to move to Mumbai with him. She refused, and that’s when he allegedly hatched a ridiculously stupid plan to get her fired.

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Tetsuya, an 84-year-old retired chemistry teacher with no real interest in fashion, managed to become somewhat of a style icon after letting his grandson dress him up for a photo shoot.

It all started last month, when Naoya Kudo went home to Akita Prefecture to visit his grandfather, Tetsuya, during Japan’s Golden Week holiday. During their reunion, Naoya asked his grandfather if he’d be willing to model some fresh designer clothes for a couple of offbeat fashion photo shoots, and the 84-year-old accepted. It gave them a chance to spend some quality time together and have some pure unadulterated fun, but none of them imagined the results of their photo shoots would become a social media success story.

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Police in the Netherlands are offering samples of a special MDMA-scented perfume to the public in the hopes that it will help people detect and report drug labs when they pass by them.

Despite the best efforts of Dutch police to curb drug manufacturing and traffic, the Netherlands is still considered the MDMA production capital of the world. Having exhausted traditional ways of battling drug crime, they’ve now taken an unconventional approach, creating a special perfume called XTACY which has an aroma very similar to the sweet smell of MDMA, a recreational drug commonly known as ‘Ecstasy’. But they’re not selling it. Instead, they’re offering samples to the public, to get them familiarized with the smell of the drug, so that when they casually walk by a drug lab producing the illegal substance, they can notify authorities about it.

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1sec Inc., a Japanese technology company that specializes in blending the digital world with our reality, has created Japan’s first virtual male influencer, a young music producer named Liam Nikuro.

If you thought making it as an Instagram influencer these days was hard, we have some bad new for you: it’s about to get even harder, with perfect-looking virtual models entering the fray. Following the success of digital social media stars like Miquela and Imma, a Japanese tech start-up set out to create the Asian country’s first virtual male model. The result of their hard work is Liam Nikuro, a young heart-throb “from Los Angeles” who reportedly works in some of the coolest and most profitable industries of our time – music, fashion, and entertainment.

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